⭐ Star Radial Blur

You know the shot: subject frozen in the center, everything around it streaking outward - the classic dolly-zoom or speed-ramp effect. That's radial blur, and it's one of those post tricks that instantly reads as "cinematic." Star Radial Blur is a single-node implementation of it, with two flavors: Zoom (everything rushing toward or away from a center point) and Spin (everything rotating around a center, like a lens spinning on its axis).

It's a finishing node for action shots, portraits and motion storytelling - put it after your generation and before save, and it sells motion in a way a static prompt can't. The pack files it under Image And Latent filters, sitting alongside its other post tools (HighPass, Black & White, HDR), and for the price of one node it replaces what would otherwise be a stack of transform-and-blend plumbing.

How it works

The effect is built the honest way: the image is sampled repeatedly at progressively scaled (Zoom) or rotated (Spin) positions around a center point, and the samples are blended. The samples input controls how many of those intermediate passes get averaged - more samples = smoother, more expensive streaks. strength scales how far the transformation pushes per sample (0–2), and center_x / center_y (0–1, defaults 0.5/0.5) place the focus point - dead center by default, or anywhere you want the subject.

Inputs that matter

• image - your input.
• mode - Zoom or Spin. Different effects, same knobs.
• strength - push per sample; 0.5 default is a good starting point.
• samples - blend count, 1–64. Start at 16; go up if the streaks look stepped.
• center_x / center_y - where the blur radiates from. Put it on the subject, not randomly.

Output: image, same shape as the input.

Install

Part of the Starnodes2024/ComfyUI_StarNodes pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Starnodes2024/ComfyUI_StarNodes
cd ComfyUI_StarNodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart, search star. Pure torch math in this one - no extra dependencies.

Where people get burned

Low samples with high strength is the classic recipe for ugly banded streaks - if your blur looks chunky, raise samples before you lower strength. And strength = 0 returns the image unchanged (the node short-circuits), so if "nothing happened," check the strength value rather than your wiring. Spin mode also exaggerates at high strength much faster than Zoom does - a 1.0 spin at 60 samples can become a psychedelic smear, which is either a happy accident or a sign you overshot.